The Public Policy: Big Labor Clintoncare

...Nor was it surprising that 72 February 1998 • The American Spectator when the Advisory Commission convened on May 13, 1997, its first speaker was Cathy Hurwit, then-deputy director of Citizen Action, and now health-care lobbyist for AFSCME...

...He delicately backed the health-care industry into a tight corner...

...This is not the first time that the Department of Labor aided a union-organizing campaign...

...In 1996, the AFL-CIO Executive Council called upon its affiliates to stop utilizing Sharp Health Care, which owns several hospitals in the San Diego area, and was then involved in a dispute with AFSCME...

...A government-run health-care system has long been a goal of organized labor, beginning with Walter Reuther, an avowed socialist and founder of the United Auto Workers' (UAW) Committee of One Hundred for National Health Insurance...

...So far, Columbia/HCA has resisted...

...They are using their ability to initiate government audits and investigations, along with smear campaigns and union-fund boycotts, to force the industry to cave in to union organizing demands...

...In addition to using members' dues to make AFSCME the largest contributor to Democratic candidates and committees (over $4 million during 1995-96, according to Federal Election Commission records), McEntee helped finance a variety of Clinton-sponsored efforts, including the selling of Hillary Clinton's health-care plan...

...Sweeney's goal is to transform the health-care industry into an enterprise where public funds form the lion's share for the wages and benefits of a large unionized workforce...

...In the mid-1970's, Shalala was director of the Municipal Assistance Corporation, the entity formed to oversee New York City's finances in the wake of its bailout from bankruptcy...

...After noting that this was "a time of profound change in health care because of efforts to rein in costs," he added: "Many Americans worry that lower costs mean lower quality and less attention to their rights...

...And guess who stands to benefit...

...If successful, the short term result of this campaign will be that union coffers will be enriched with the dues of millions of health-care workers...

...It seems more likely the unions are using their friends in the administration to help in their organizing drives...

...Already heavily-regulated and substantially funded by the government, and with Bill Clinton controlling key enforcement agencies, the industry is seen by Sweeney as particularly ripe for picking...

...These would amount to smear campaigns against hospitals and HMOs in an attempt to intimidate them into recognizing unions for fear of losing patients...

...Sweeney has a winning track record in these matters, too...

...AFSCME represents more than a million state and local government employees, several hundred thousand of whom are health-care workers in state mental institutions and county or city hospitals...

...The operation was so vigorous and heavy-handed it led to the forced resignation of former Labor Secretary Reich's representative for the western region, Rick Sawyer...

...AFSCME's director of organizing is Paul Booth, a former national officer and founding member of SDS...

...Though the current system allows ample room for chicanery, the coincidence of government fraud audits and union organizing drives may be no accident...

...The union attack on non-unionized health-care providers is being aided by the Clinton administration...

...He did his best to distance himself from his wife's ridiculed plan while vindicating its impetus...

...He and his wife, Heather, who is now one of John Sweeney's top assistants, formed the Midwest Academy in the early 1970's to train a new generation of socialist organizers...

...We all have to bear our fair share...

...These hospitals have been in decline for decades...

...In fact, it had been decided some nine months earlier during the president's re-election campaign...

...In Las Vegas last year it was threatened with a boycott by the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union, which accounts for loo,000 union family members, unless it agreed to a union contract for its employees...

...The plan involves a two-pronged strategy of weakening the major health-care providers through fierce and even illegal organizing tactics while simultaneously waging a "consumer" campaign, featuring the president, to underminethe public's confidence in the current system...

...With his promise to McEntee, Clinton made good on a huge political debt...

...In other words, dangling union-member health-care funds in a carrot-and-stick fashion before HMOs as an inducement for them to unionize is illegal...

...The plan, if successful, could very well result in the centralization of medicine and the resurrection of Clintoncare only three years after it had been declared dead...

...He fomented public anxiety...

...In return, the AFL-CIO and its affiliated unions steer business to the Kaiser HMO...

...That experience taught Sweeney that it is easier to organize and bargain for employees in the public sector with contribution-hungry, pliant politicians who pay for labor's contracts with taxpayers' money...

...closings and sell-offs have recently accelerated as a result of decisions by state and local governments to use HMOs or other forms of managed care to provide medical care to their Medicaid recipients...

...Sawyer was an SEIU official before becoming Reich's representative, and, following his dismissal from the Department of Labor, he returned to a union job...

...There are so many people How the AFL-CIO is moving to socialize health care...

...Currently, the U.S...

...Sweeney reportedly views America's health-care industry—with its millions of workers, large facilities, and lack of foreign competition—as the key to a revived trade-union presence and a lucrative source of dues-paying members...

...In that capacity, Shalala tried to reduce New York City's costs and developed a contentious relationship with its public employee unions...

...STEPHEN SILBIGER worked from 1980 to 1988 as associate director for legislation at the American Federation ofState, County and Municipal Employees...

...The Midwest Academy then spawned a network of "citizen" groups that organized themselves, with the help of union funding, into Citizen Action...

...McEntee, naturally, would play a major behindthe-scenes role, particularly regarding the commission's make-up...

...But others have been more submissive...

...The union-funded Citizen Action already had its own health-care proposal entitled a "Managed Care Consumers' Bill of Rights...

...Other union appointees to the commission include Betty Bednarczyk, secretary-treasurer of the SEIU, Robert Georgine, head of the Building and Construction Trades division of the AFL-CIO, and Ronald Pollack, executive director of Families USA, an organization funded by liberal foundations and labor unions which spent nearly a million dollars supporting the Clinton health-care plan...

...with the AFL-CIO, Kaiser lay down for the union...

...The group was recently implicated inlaundering hundreds of thousands of dollars in embezzled Teamster money...

...The AFL-CIO has made hospitals, HMOs, and nursing homes its top organizing priority, and much of its lobbying has focused on expanding healthcare regulations and mandates...

...Taking advantage of this affordability crisis, a campaign for a government takeover of the health-care industry will be launched...

...Labor's vast purchasing power was also used to induce Kaiser-Permanente, one of the country's largest HMOs, to unionize some of its operations...

...Department of Labor has reportedly targeted the health-care industry for an unusually aggressive enforcement campaign...

...Not surprisingly, McEntee sees managed care and private hospitals as a direct threat to his union's treasury and viability...

...But we shouldn't wait for Congress to act...

...Rather, the White House is fulfilling a favor it owes Big Labor by playing a feature role in the AFL-CIO's own push for an organized health-care industry...

...The "sole" and "exclusive" purpose of these funds is to purchase the best plan possible for rank-and-file members, whether from a unionized HMO or not...

...After all, they'll have the dues of several million health-care workers for their next political campaign...

...While McEntee's interest in health care is motivated by the prospect of more money, AFSCME is not without its own left-wing activists...

...However, the implications will be much broader than an improvement in union finances...

...In 1994, when the SEIU was attempting to organize janitors, a similar oversight campaign was launched by the department against the cleaning-service industry in California...

...Earlier in his career, Sweeney served as president of the Service Employees International Union...

...The American Spectator • February 1998 71 in this country that...feel like they're always going to be on the losing end of cost-cuffing and quality issues in every sector of life—maybe even where they work...

...But the truly masterful stroke was casting the commission's conclusions as independently reached through diverse input ("This Consumer Bill of Rights...is the product of a broad consensus from a broad group of business leaders and health insurers, working people and health advocates, doctors and nurses...

...Today, that tradition of political conviction lives on in AFL-CIO president John Sweeney, a card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America, and his lieutenants, many of them former leaders of New Left groups like Students for a Democratic Society and the Midwest Academy...

...And the healthcare industry, I believe, as a whole truly shares our goals of improving quality...

...These costs, combined with efforts by politicians to curry favor with special interest groups of medical providers by mandating certain services in all health insurance plans, will likely lead to a return to the double-digit inflation in health insurance premiums that occurred before the recent shift to managed care...

...Managed care providers tripled their enrollment of Medicaid recipients between 1991 and 1995...

...McEntee not only gave generously to the DNC for its support efforts, he authorized funding for several bus caravans of activists to lend the appearance of grassroots support for Clintoncare when it was in its death throes...

...And other campaigns, too...

...In addition, McEntee has actively solicited AFSCME employees to contribute to Clinton's legal defense fund.44 Clinton will help by undermining public confidence in the current system...

...For his part, Clinton made an Oscar-winning performance at the November zo press conference...

...The Wage and Hour Administration of the U.S...

...He not only succeeded in that effort, but was further rewarded when Meredith Miller, a former official of both the SEIU and AFL-CIO, was named as the Department of Labor's coordinator for the Advisory Commission...

...W bile the Clinton administration and "citizen" groups stir up fears about the quality of the health-care system, unions are using their purchasing power to intimidate health-care providers into organizing...

...In addition to using their health-care funds, a union official disclosed that labor plans to initiate "educational" campaigns among union members and retirees about the quality of care provided by the institutions targeted for organizing...

...But don't be misled...

...As labor leaders see it, the Clinton plan failed because Americans thought it would limit their access to physicians of their own choosing and reduce the quality of care they receive...

...McEntee thus lobbied the president for a large Labor Department role in the Advisory Commission...

...The organization played a pivotal grassroots role in the union health-care campaign...

...One such example of this involves Columbia/HCA, the world's largest hospital chain...

...They now hope to turn these fears against the health-care industry itself and subject it to a new round of regulations on services...

...Clinton then charged the commission members with developing a "Consumer Bill of Rights" for patients...

...McEntee was an early Clinton supporter in the primaries of 1992, and AFSCME locals in New York were essential to Clinton's victory in the state's critical primary...

...The fact that such a government takeover would inevitably lead to the bureaucratization of medical care and a serious decline in the quality of services will be of little concern to the AFL-CIO leaders who devised this plan...

...The president's use of the term "bill of rights" in a health-care context was telling...

...The Congressional Budget Office has recently estimated that a one-percent increase in the cost of health insurance raises the number of uninsured by 200,000...

...But the use of employee health-care funds as leverage for union organizing is illegal under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA, 4o4(a)(1)), which requires that these funds be used "solely in the interest of the participants and beneficiaries and for the exclusive purpose of providing benefits to participants and their beneficiaries...

...While centralized health-care would represent an important ideological victory for labor, union officials confide that baser motivations are driving the AFL-CIO's campaign...

...To ensure that union interests were well represented, Clinton named Secretary of Labor Alexis Herman as a co-chair of the Advisory Commission alongside Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala...

...In announcing the formation of the Advisory Commission, Clinton left little doubt as to what he expected from its participants...

...Under his leadership, the SEIU changed from a union that primarily represented janitors and doormen in privately-owned office and apartment buildings to one dominated by state and local government employees...

...According to a Clinton administration official close to AFSCME, McEntee received a commitment that the president would appoint a commission to study the quality of health care...

...Some [of these protections] will require federal standards to be implemented...

...Ordinarily, a health-care commission would be chaired solely by Shalala, but McEntee didn't think Shalala was sufficiently pro-union...

...Such inflation will inevitably force some employers to reduce or drop their health-care benefits...

...The HMO readily agreed to greater job security for its workers (both union and non-union) and to what the Daily Labor Report described as ((unprecedented input into patient care, and strategic and marketing strategy...

...neither individual rights nor consumer protection are at the heart of the administration's resurgent interest in health care...

...But with labor friends in high places, union leaders feel safe in violating this worker-protection clause without any fear of prosecution...

...Under a "national partnership agreement" signed44 McEntee actively solicited AFSCME workers to contribute to Clinton's defense fund...

...The inner-city public hospitals in which AFSCME members work tend to be inefficiently managed and provide inferior services at high costs to the governments that own and fund them...

...The loss of health-care coverage by millions of Americans will create a crisis, triggering a new campaign by the AFL-CIO to have the government take over the health-care industry, imposing price controls and mandating universal coverage...

...In the summer of '96, Clinton convened an exclusive Oval Office health-care meeting at the behest of Gerald McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (an affiliate union of the AFL-CIO...

...These mandates will drive up the cost of health insurance and place it beyond the means of millions of Americans...

...He even bundled it all together —mass anxiety, victimization, health care, labor, and security-throughgovernment...

...And they certainly are most frightened of it when it comes to health care...

...He made a pitch for increased government participation...

...What Clinton failed to mention was that the outcome had been decided even before the commission was appointed on March 26,1997...

...On November 20,1997, President Clinton held a White House press conference to announce his endorsement of a "Health Care Consumer Bill of Rights" developed by an advisory commission he appointed...

...Still, I think it's fair to say that almost every family feels some insecurity at...the scope and pace of change in the health care industry...

...The unionization of the hospital industry will set off a chain reaction that will inevitably lead to escalating healthcare costs...

...There is an emerging consensus in America that, while people may not have wanted to bite the whole apple at once in 1994, almost the whole populace wants to keep nibbling away at the apple...

...1 McEntee's interest in health care is more than academic...

...Department of Health and Human Services is conducting an intensive Medicare and Medicaid fraud investigation of Columbia/HCA hospitals, which is a target of SEIU organizing...

...Within months of the call for this boycott, Sharp Health Care agreed to a lop-sided contract with AFSCME...

...04 The American Spectator • February 1998 73...